PhD in Psychology Neuroscience and Data Science

Working memory updating for social stimuli: faces

ProfessorPalladino Paola

Working memory updating for social stimuli: faces

Updating is a crucial function responsible of working memory integrity, allowing relevant information active and inhibiting irrelevant one. Updating has been studied mainly with verbal stimuli, less with faces, stimuli with high adaptive value and social meaning. Our aim is to compare an updating process with no socially relevant material (i.e., letters) and with socially relevant material (i.e., human faces, where in particular the combination between facial expression and gaze direction was manipulated). In both tasks we would collect response times (RTs) at different steps of an updating task (i.e., encode maintain and update goal-relevant information).